Fundamentalist GOP

I am almost finished reading a fascinating book by Andrew Sullivan called "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost it and How to Get it Back". Sullivan's thesis is that the modern (post 2000) Republican Party has been taken over by fundamentalists. Sully is referring to a mode of thinking based on a set of unquestioned beliefs where evidence to the contrary is immediately dismissed and anyone asking questions is attacked as traitorous. Sullivan contrasts this approach with classical conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke that is profoundly skeptical of ideologies and favors a measured, pragmatic, reality-based approach.

The primary example in the book is the prosecution of the Iraq war by the administration of George W. Bush. The administration was widely reported to be committed to invading Iraq very early on. As the Downing Street memo famously concluded "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." After the invasion, conditions in Iraq quickly deteriorated, yet the administration remained in denial allowing the situation to grow worse.

Sullivan characterizes the current Republican approach (cheered on by right-wing media allies such as Fox News) similarly. He sees the so-called conservatives of the GOP as actually quite radical and Obama as more conservative, again in the classical sense of the word.

This FNC/RNC merger is another threat to reasoned discourse in public life, because it is a showman's concoction of very powerful emotional elements: resentment, sex, religion, anger. It creates its own reality. "We Do Not Torture"; everyone in Gitmo was the "Worst of the Worst"; the stimulus lowered growth; all the debt is Obama's fault; Obama is a Muslim and non-American; the White House is stacked with the Islamist/socialist enemy within; if we had not bailed out the banks, we would be roaring back from the recession; Obama wants to ignore the war in order to effect a radical transformation of America into some kind of scary version of France and Waziristan. And on and on. I'm not exaggerating. Listen to these maniacs.

Non-believing people have a hard time swallowing all this. It seems so wacko. Religious people who have had any experience of fundamentalism in their lives know it all too well. Forget the RNC, Michael Steele or John Boehner. Ignore Romney.The new RNC is FNC. Roger Ailes is creating a new political entity that could redefine the right in America for a generation, and if it gets to power, will make the two terms of George W. Bush look like a golden era. No one in the GOP can stop this. Because Ailes now has their entire base in his hands. What he frames they will believe. When McCain surrendered to Palin, it was his last - and unintended - blow to a sane or responsible conservatism.

Sullivan is not alone in this assessment among those with historic ties to a GOP that no longer welcomes them due to the sin of dissent. Liberal blogger George Packer and conservative blogger David Frum are friends who discuss these issues despite their ideological differences (wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall during those conversations?). Packer quotes Frum before the '08 election in his New Yorker blog Interesting Times.

“The thing I worry about most is if the Republicans lose this election—and if you’re a betting man you have to believe they will—there will be a fundamentalist reaction. Not religious—but the beaten party believes it just has to say it louder. Like the Democrats after 1968. A lot of the problems in the Republican Party will not be fixed."

Packer adds:

In Virginia last month, I interviewed a Republican official who’s running for Congress. He has a long record of reasonable service on the local school board and county board, and he told me that he is going to run on a record of solid achievement in government office, which probably means that his candidacy is doomed. At one point, he said almost casually that he believed President Obama is deliberately running the economy into the ground in order to have a pretext to refashion it along socialist lines. This kind of thing now reflects ordinary, unremarkable Republican thinking...Frum is on the case: read his withering critiques on FrumForum. At this point, he’s a very lonely voice.

Frum may be lonely but he is not alone. Bruce Bartlett, former Reagan budget official and (ironically) one of the inventors of the supply-side economics that have been twisted into a part of current GOP orthodoxy, offers similarly cogent observations of the party in his blog Capital Gains and Games. Frum and Bartlett are part of a vanishing breed--the moderate Republican.

--Ballard Burgher